It's officially spring today - time to clean your network

Get a few tips on what areas of your network are worth a look or even some updating - not only in spring

Spring is here and for many of us, that means spring cleaning – the garage, the garden, the balcony, or just all those piles of papers off the desk at the office. While you’re cleaning and reorganizing your surroundings, it’s also a good idea to take a look at your network and make sure that is also cleaned up. Below is a list of our top 7 best practices for cleaning up your network and devices.

1. What is in your network? Should it (still) be there?

When discovering (or rescanning) your network, you can often detect some idle device plugged into the network years ago and eating up energy or space. By performing full network discovery, you can update network asset inventory as well, possibly identifying malfunctioning or down-for-month devices.

You can decide if you want to donate them (permanently deleting their content first) - otherwise, plan for safe and secure disposal of old networking equipment, while also ensuring that these devices do not end up in the dump, harming the planet.

2. Do you monitor everything that is in your network? Are there any blind spots?

For efficient management of your resources, you need to have possibly full awareness of your network performance. Ask yourself a question - is there anything in the network that you need to monitor but cannot right now? Can you monitor it with the monitoring system you already use? The below questions may help you check your monitoring options:

• Can you get performance data about this device via SNMP monitoring? Or maybe you can read this data from a text log?
• Is it possible to track events related to this system or device by receiving events from external sources such as Syslog or web messages?
• If it is your custom application, maybe performance data can be obtained by remotely executing of script on this device?
• Can performance data be pushed to your network monitoring system?
• You can also verify if all device config backups are collected. Are you able to easily restore the right config if the device breaks down or when you need to replace it with a new one?
• For Windows machines, you can check if all required hotfixes are installed.

3. Is SNMP enabled on all networking equipment, secure credentials set?

Most, if not all networking equipment supports the SNMP protocol that is used for extensive performance monitoring. Every month or quarter new network devices are added, and older ones come back from servicing - that's why it is always reasonable to make sure that SNMP is enabled on them and the correct community is set up on them (do not use default public community, it is a known security risk).

When all community details are provided in the network monitoring system, you can instantly track the performance of all network devices and get automatic layer 2 and layer 3 maps data that is necessary to maintain up to date maps of your network topology.

4. Review all privileged user accounts in your network.

Make sure to remove the ones that are no longer used or needed. Check if the access rights are not too broad. It is also a great opportunity to check the access rights of all employees or partners that can log in to your network monitoring system. If you are managing a larger IT team, it may be reasonable to design and implement user groups to manage notifications rather than doing it manually per each user. It makes things much easier when people are changing positions - you can move them between user groups in NetCrunch rather than manually modifying their notification or responsibilities details.

Review all advanced options for optimized network monitoring scenarios designed for larger networks or teams.

5. Check all alerting scripts, are correct alert escalation steps included?

I hope you avoid the manual setting of alert per metric or per device - NetCrunch has monitoring packs and various alerting scripts for that. It is worth mentioning that you are not limited to just notification action in alerting. You can implement various remote, automatic remediation actions that can be executed before you or someone from your team is notified about the problem. If some areas of your network are plagued by temporary peaks, you can implement conditional alerts to concentrate on situations that persist for some time or follow a specific pattern.

The goal is to let NetCrunch fix the problem first - and only if the problem persists it should be escalated to notify the human about it. This is what we expect from modern network monitoring software. Endless floods of notification messages from the monitoring system should stay in the past.

6. Views updated, top charts or other maps

Network inventory, connections, trends, status, and performance data can be organized and presented in various ways. You can also add any metadata that helps you better organize your network administration and get your daily tasks accomplished. This is why it is worth reviewing what custom data you'd like or need to add to the node's properties so that you can use it to create node views. You can also use graphical views to visualize any process, area, or service map that your team needs to support or troubleshoot in your organization.

7. Integrations, sharing data or views with other colleagues or systems

Finally, think about how you can further increase the ROI from your monitoring system by sharing selected data with other colleagues, partners, or contractors without giving them outright access to the network monitoring system. This can be accomplished by using one or more of the integration services that are included in NetCrunch. In this way selected performance metrics, status or alert info can be forwarded to the external helpdesk, collaboration system, or even other network management systems or BI applications.